The best...and worst of EvilToasterElf

Last Stand

A middle-aged man walks
a fluorescent street in Amsterdam,
high on hash, and purple haze.
He stops at the door of a leggy blonde
pacing her sexual cell.
The tag on the door says thirty euros,
a whore twice the price of cab fair
back to the hotel.
He opens the door and places the money
on a small table next to the bed.
He throws her down and exacts revenge
on his dead mother.
A small, bald man comes in after,
he takes twenty euros mechanically
off the table and leaves in silence.

When the customer reaches his hotel
and smokes his last cigarette
he pays 28 dollars to connect
to his father in Cleveland
They talk away what seem the entire
6 months before the cancer ate
the remaining half of his liver.
A disease he was convinced passed through
the cells of his mother,
who had lost her last stand
fifteen years before.

Caricatures

On the rainy days there weren’t people on the street,
only floating parasols, octagon carapaces
immune to the shivering blades of water.
They are toes that never dip into the ocean,
children that sat on the edge of the pool;
their own shriveled fingers
too much a reminder of mortality.
They read their future in prune claws.
When the crows leap from one glazed eye to the other,
they chide Bobby for playing on the lawn,
as they dress in a caricature of their own parents.

Distant Survivor

I. September 11, 2001

When I turn on the TV,
I see black smoke
billowing from the North Tower.
It is the first time I felt
all of my senses attune
to a single object
and my mind blanket itself
in thoughtless dark.
My hands do not fidget,
and no words emerge
from the crevices
of my subconscious,
to plume like fires that burst
from shattered windows.
I am distantly aware of screams
kneading themselves
into the blank walls around me.
As my mind begins to thaw
with the realization that my building,
the South Tower, was unscathed
the second plane hit.
College life is beginning to set in,
but I know that my life begins
at this moment
and I would meet it
in the position I find myself now.
Helpless,
and on my knees.


II. Severed Elevator

I rolled from my bed as the coffin of night slowly raised its lid.
The sun always hit the windshield dead on,
for five minutes of the drive to the train station.

I parked far from the platform,
because the 6:50 is the third train of the morning.
Michael Asher, Jeremy’s father, also took the 6:50,
also worked in the World Trade Center.
We sat together and talked or slept through the ride to work.

He spoke to me one morning of abandoned mines
he had explored with his girlfriend in California,
the shafts filled with cold water and the debris
of miner’s lives. That girlfriend became a wife,
that wife a mother of two.

He worked in the north tower, I in the south.
We departed at the foundations of rock and steel
to go to our separate elevators.

We met occasionally on the ride home,
we talked about our jobs and
our love of hiking and steaks.

Two weeks after my summer job had ended
I stare at a TV, when I flip the channels the
smoke and fire follow me.

I call Jeremy’s cell phone,
because his father’s tower was hit first.
The answer to my question is the one hundred and first,
for a company called Cantor Fitzgerald.
The girlfriend is now a widow, and the phone
falls from my hand when a small piece of metal
is replayed in slow motion
crashing into my office.


III. Funeral for a Friend

A week later we are at Adam’s funeral.
His wife is besieged by breast cancer,
the growth that will not stop
swallows her complexion,
and her smile.
It is here I meet the friends and coworkers
who are left, and embrace each one
to prove they are still alive.
Adam also made it out of the building,
his was one of the few bodies recovered,
crushed under the rubble outside the front door.

The casket is closed.

At the end of the service music plays above us.
A voice that everyone in the room recognizes
but would never grace the airwaves.
It is Adam’s voice, in the band he led before
the business world stole him away.
His words slowly tear down all the walls the
crowd had erected, all the breakers erode
before the squall of those songs.

There is a dinner after the storm subsides
At some point I notice my father is not at the table.
I walk awkwardly outside, to take a break
from the intensity of dinner eulogies.
I see him by the car, his face is flushed.
I have never hugged anyone as hard as I hug him then.

It is the first time I have ever seen my father cry.


IV. To those who fell from the 84th floor

I lie in bed, rolling from side to side, staring from wall to ceiling,
unable to blink,
or conjure up any empty space,
because I am afraid.
Not the usual fear of heartbreak or mortality,
but the fear of memory.
The simple act of blinking floods my sight with faces
a new one every blink, every second of darkness is someone
who burned or fell.
With every blink, and every face, an eternity flashes forward and I
can’t keep up.
The same people who shared Chinese food and cubicles make me afraid
to close my eyes.
I lie awake with the lamps on,
but there is no comfort in white walls and dark windows.
I am waiting for tears while denying they will help.
The memorials are short, but empty caskets fall nightly into the void of my eyelids.
The sun appears through the half drawn blinds
I am sweating
I pull off my covers as if they were the death mask of some decaying pharaoh.
I don’t know how to live anymore
with the knowledge that so many lives have gone unfinished


V. August, 2004

For a while it was hard to take the ferry
past those two holes in the sky.
I was convinced the downtown smog
would avoid that patch of air.
A memory that exists
like the clarity of immediate space
around cars that drive through the night fog.
And now I take the subway,
like walking through a cemetery blindfolded.
The train buckles as if driven on rails of shame and corpses
This concrete hole in the city shivers
it is the womb of modern history
A dream played out on the eyes of a coma patient

Footsteps echo through the nearby office buildings
who have for the first time seen the sun.
What is a fit tribute to the ghosts who stumble in the dust of public records?
Any park, any place of forget and remembrance calculatingly mixed
serve only as a wilted bouquet in the terminal wing
a reminder of life for that fleeting moment
between a memory of a dead relative
and a drop of moisture pressed from the brain
to the ducts behind the eye.
All around those concrete stumps are the carrion and vultures
of tragedy


VI. Tiny Strings

I am at my most vulnerable falling asleep.
When memories drift like mist over a graveyard,
filling the black closets of thought with
colors and figures I can imagine, but cannot see.

I remember watching a bus burn.

During a clear afternoon in October
I saw one of London’s double-deckers
stop in the middle of the street,
with black smoke rising from its engine.

I saw people scurry out in waves
like rain water from a gutter.

Flames followed the smoke
and I was so awestruck, that it didn’t occur
even if I’d had a phone, to call for help.

The bright red paint darkens on the bottom
and fire fills the windows at the top of the bus
A brightly glowing tumor on Tottenham Court Road.

All of the emergency training that life affords
shimmers between eye blinks and vanishes
somewhat like dead farmers
who capture the fury of tornados in their camcorders
before their homes are sucked into the maelstrom.

I think perhaps we cannot blame those who strive
for destruction.
Who consume themselves in explosion

Maybe we should share the blame
Didn’t we create government to shelter us
from the beauty of panic?
How long is it since we forgot that the world is sewn
with the strings of spider’s silk?

Bibliobella wrote:

Last Stand

A middle-aged man walks
a fluorescent street in Amsterdam,
high on hash, and purple haze.
good
He stops at the door of a leggy blonde
Do you think destitute and without options when you think leggy?
pacing her sexual cell. very good description of what it looks like
The tag on the door says thirty euros,
a whore twice the price of cab fair
back to the hotel.
“She’s” vs “whore”? Otherwise he calculates life in money? I see it in the ending.

He opens the door and places the money
on a small table next to the bed.

He throws her down and exacts revenge
on his dead mother. This is a little choppy. I recognize the act is suppose to be quick and choppy, but it comes out of nowhere especially the part about the mother

A small, bald man comes in after,
he takes twenty euros mechanically
off the table and leaves in silence.
good
When the customer reaches his hotel
and smokes his last cigarette
he pays 28 dollars to connect
to his father in Cleveland.
brings out the man's nature
They talk away what seem the entire
6 months before the cancer ate
the remaining half of his liver.
the father’s liver?

A disease he was convinced passed through
the cells of his mother,
who had lost her last stand
fifteen years before.
so, he's been waiting 15 years to rape someone to avenge the cancer that killed his mother? Or did his mother rape him, and then he raped someone . . .I'm not sure how he feels about his mother. Now, if you wanted the man to come off as almost emotionless, and I think you did, it worked. He does seem a bit like an automaton, maybe, but angry. I don't know if you need to explore the relationships with his parents more, but I need a little more to know why he treated someone else so poorly. There are many stories in this poem.

Well, the poem is supposed to simply convey the kind of strangling anger and frustration that comes with something like a terminal disease. And how these things make you irrational, irrational enough to brutalize a working girl, the line about "exacting revenge" is meant to be a kind of barrier, a kind of jarring metaphor and slows everything to a stop, because it signifies the new direction the narrative is taking. And the prostitutes in Amsterdam are actually far from destitute or desperate, they as a profession have a union, health insurance, the works. It's not the best job, but it's hardly the street corner meth and heroin addicts we have in the states. So leggy actually is a good description of some of the remarkably beautiful women who work the red light district in Amsterdam.

The last item, which I had thought a couple of times about changing around, is making it obvious who has the liver cancer, the son or the father. But the more I played with it, the more I sort of like the line as ambiguous.

The whole poem is in a way, I can understand you wanting to learn more, to understand the rationale behind this man's choices, but the point is that there is no rationale, the whole poem lives in this entirely irrational moment. And that's all it has to be really, is a moment. Everything else becomes imput from the reader, which is why you can interpret poetry so freely.

Thankyou so much again for the comments, and for taking the time to be specific.

Steve

trappedinmyradio wrote:

it's yin-yang - no g.

i really like this one - until the end. "why until the end?," you ask. well, the end forces an interpretation, while the first stanza lets my mind do it's own thinking about this guy. if you want to set it up the way it ends then incorporate that stuff into the stanza...or two stanzas...but, let that idea flirt about throughout the piece, instead of hanging it on the end.

I have to really figure out exactly which line in this poem is the misleading one. Because people keep saying the last stanza doesn't fit with the main character. However, it's not supposed to, because it's a different person. The old man in the beginning of the poem dies. Then a new family moves in, to begin the whole cycle again. Which is why I like the title, it's about the house, not the man. This has no bearing on you, because you did exactly what a reader is supposed to do, interpret for themselves. But people keep interpreting something that's not supposed to be there, so I'm going to have to change something around. Thanks for the comments.

Bibliobella wrote:

White Noise

The snow shakes its way out of the sky
when hard time with this word without punctuation
it reaches the swathes of light
cast by the tall lamps
above an empty parking lot
snow covered bats race between flakes
the blind doves of winter

squeeze the wind from the air like water drawn
from a fist of snow
by knuckles that glow red from the cold
and breath that escapes from the mouth
like smoky dreams from the opium den I see the transtion of images without punctuation, but since this image isn't in the outside it's forced

and boot prints range why this word?
across the white fields
like breasts appear spontaneously
from the white noise I read of images to see, and I read of images to feel, but I don't read of images to hear of adult channels
If I may be bold - I don't sense you in this poem, as I sense you in your other poems. I sense you trying out someone else's style.

White Noise and Caricatures are kind of like poetic blue prints right now, I probably cranked them out in ten minutes and looked at them once or twice afterwords, it's kind of an audience test, the reason they seem so different is because I haven't neurotically tweaked the strings of images together a dozen different ways.

So these actually two, which you very accurately and correctly blew apart, and thankyou - they needed it - act like a kind of litmus to how I write my poetry. It almost always starts as a semi-vacant series of metaphors, and images that are very visual, colors, shapes, etc... and later the layers begin to pile on, so I suppose we can see that my eyes are the backbone of my poetry. Thanks for the comments again, these will re-appear in a different form later on I assure you.

Cheers

An asthmatic faucet spits gouts of tarnished water
into a rusted sink,
below a cracked mirror.
When I exit the bathroom,
the line of blank stares,
inches closer.

Beneath the lights of the bar,
we toast our shots of Southern Comfort
under the auspices of Jimmy Hendrix.
We shout to each other because we want to laugh,
because whispers are for churches and classrooms.
We paid two dollars to rent this hour,
and fill this vacant lot of memory.

We exit our local bars at last call and walk home
screaming nicknames down the dark alleys
through tin cans attached by strings of memory.
We drink shots at our children’s weddings,
and the open bars of our high school reunions
leaving pools of urine in the white porcelain
of funeral homes.

What is an American life, if not a collection?
An album of revelry, of drinks and conversations
whose exact words float in cigarette smoke
around the warped lips of aging loves.

The Drive

Stale pictures fill the pavement
between glimpses of the road, stolen
from the storm by windshield wipers
at high speed. And I drive through it.

I drive through the rain picking through memories
scattered like high beams in the evening fog.
She twirls through those memories,
a parade of cameos in a silent movie, black and white,

grainy as the songs that flicker at the edge
of the broadcast signal’s strength. Classic rock,
classical symphony, and a talking head playing
the rusty strings of Bible verse, all fight for clarity.

And in that static one song plays,
booming down the rails on a genetic train
straight from childhood wonder
through the still quiet of fatherhood.

She sits with our child wrapped
in the ambiguous white linens,
smiling a full-toothed smile,
a cobblestone path to my little girl,
who hoola-hoops around guard rails
and hop-scotches over the double yellow,
and I follow her.

I follow her Reebok puddle jumps until
footfalls fade into dry pavement.
My windshield wipers hum,
against the blonde strands of dawn
kneading shadowy rainbows into the clouds,
as she fades into the distant mountains.